Culture in the Nara period

The cultural flowering centring on Buddhism was an outcome of lively exchanges with other nations. Four times within 70 years the government sent official missions to the Tang court, each mission accompanied by a large number of students who went to study in China. By this time Tang had formed a great empire that controlled not only the central plains of China but parts of Mongolia and Siberia to the north and of Central Asia to the west.

Nara culture, borrowing from the Tang, whose capital, Chang’an, was a great international city, evinced a marked international flavour itself. The consecration ceremony of the Great Buddha of Tōdai Temple, for example, was conducted by a Brahman high priest born in India, while the music was played by musicians from throughout East Asia.

But despite this internationalism, respect was also shown for traditional Japanese cultural forms. An outstanding example of this respect is the collection of Japanese verse known as Man’yōshū (c. 8th century ce), an anthology of 4,500 poems both ancient and contemporary. Poets represented in the anthology range over all classes of society, from the emperor and members of the imperial family through the aristocracy and the priesthood to farmers, soldiers, and prostitutes; and the scenery celebrated in the verse represents districts throughout the country. The poems deal directly and powerfully with basic human themes, such as love between men and women or between parents and children, and are deeply imbued with the traditional spirit of Japan, scarcely influenced at all by Buddhist or Confucian ideas. The anthology had immense influence on all subsequent Japanese culture.

The compilation of Japan’s two most ancient histories, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, also took place at the beginning of the 8th century. Both works are extremely important, for they draw on oral or written traditions handed down from much earlier times. The histories—a combination of myth, folk belief, and, as they near the contemporary age, historical fact—were highly political in nature: by stressing the connection between the imperial family and the sun goddess (Amaterasu), they provided a written legitimation of the rule of the imperial house. By purposely dating Japanese history back as far as 660 bce, the compilers sought to raise the level of national sophistication in Chinese and Korean eyes.

Changes in ritsuryō government

In 794, as noted above, the emperor Kammu shifted his capital to Heian, diluted the ties between government and Buddhism, and attempted to revive government in accordance with the ritsuryō. Commanding that the provisions of the ritsuryō system be enforced, he also amended those articles that were no longer relevant to the age. Since it was difficult in practice to carry out the allocation of rice fields once every 6 years, this was amended to once in 12 years. A tighter watch was imposed on corruption among local officials. The original system of raising conscript troops from among the peasantry was abolished, and soldiers were thenceforth selected from among the sons of local officials with martial prowess. Kammu, continuing campaigns that had plagued the regime since Nara times, dispatched large conscript armies against the Ezo (Emishi), a nonsubject tribal group in the northern districts of Honshu who were regarded as aliens. The Ezo eventually were pacified, although the northern border was never fully brought under the control of the central government. Those Ezo who submitted to government forces were resettled throughout the empire and largely assimilated into the existing population.

Interference in affairs of state by religious authorities was forbidden, but they were encouraged to see that Buddhism fulfilled its proper functions. Kammu was a supporter of Buddhism for both national and individual purposes. He dispatched two brilliant monks, Saichō and Kūkai, to China to study. Each of them, on his return to Japan, established a new sect of Japanese Buddhism: the Tendai sect, founded by Saichō, and the Shingon sect, established by Kūkai. In the Nara period, Buddhism had been no more than a transplantation of the Buddhism of Tang China, but the two new sects, though derived from China, developed in a characteristically Japanese fashion. As headquarters of their new sects, Saichō and Kūkai founded, respectively, the Enryaku Temple on Mount Hiei and the Kongōbu Temple on Mount Kōya. The two sects were thenceforth to form the mainstream of Japanese Buddhism.

After Kammu, successive emperors carried on his policies, and society enjoyed some 150 years of peace. The formal aspects of government, at least, were carefully observed, and the supplementing of the legal codes, the compilation of histories, and the minting of coins all took place frequently in accordance with precedent. The social reality, however, became increasingly chaotic, and form and actuality were soon traveling along quite different courses. The very foundations of ritsuryō government began to crumble because of the difficulty of carrying out the allotment system based on census registers and the consequent decline in government revenue. Two changes were instituted early in the 10th century that, while temporarily shoring up government finances, eventually led to further erosion of the ideals of the authority-intensive ritsuryō system. First, the state decided to calculate taxes on the basis of land units rather than individuals. The government set up taxation units based on paddy fields upon which both rent and corvée could easily be assessed. Second, the central government gave up the details of administering provincial affairs, leaving local matters to governors (now increasingly called zuryō, or “tax managers”) and local resident officials (zaichō kanjin) who were mainly responsible for forwarding to Heian a specified tax amount. It now became easier to calculate the amount of taxable public land (kōden) in each province, but entrusting so much authority to governors opened the gates for further abuse, especially the possibilities of increasing the amount of lands held in tax-free estates. Thus, the reality of Heian society continued to deviate from the ritsuryō ideal.

Another example of the divergence between form and reality is the fact that while, on the surface, appointments to official posts were made in accord with ritsuryō stipulations, real power shifted to other posts that were newly created outside the codes as the occasion demanded. Early examples were the two new posts created during the early 9th century: kurōdo, a kind of secretary and archivist to the emperor, and kebiishi, the imperial police, who ultimately developed powers to investigate crimes and determine punishments. The two most important posts developed outside the ritsuryō codes were those of sesshō (regent) and kampaku (chief councillor), better known by an abbreviated combination of the two terms, sekkan (regency). The original role of the sesshō was to attend to affairs of state during the minority of the emperor, whereas the kampaku’s role was to attend to state matters for the emperor even after he had come of age. Neither post had been foreseen by the ritsuryō system, which was based on the principle of direct rule by the emperor.

Prior to the early Heian period, all sovereigns had been adults, and seemingly no one had envisioned the enthronement of a child emperor. In the mid-9th century, however, when nine-year-old Seiwa ascended the throne, his maternal grandfather, Fujiwara Yoshifusa, created the office of sesshō, based on the post once held by imperial family members such as the empress Jingū and the princes Nakano Ōe and Shōtoku. Yoshifusa’s son Mototsune became sesshō during the minority of the succeeding emperor Yōzei, and then in the reign of the emperor Uda, he created the post of kampaku. It thus became the established custom that a member of the Fujiwara family should serve as sesshō and kampaku. In order to hold the sekkan offices, it was necessary that the person concerned should marry his daughter into the imperial family and then establish the resulting offspring as emperor. In other words, the indispensable qualification was that one should be the emperor’s maternal grandfather or father-in-law. While not totally new with the Fujiwara—the maternal relatives of the early Yamato rulers (notably the Soga) were the important powers at court—the system reached its height and perfection under the Fujiwara. As a result of this complex system, there were constant struggles at court involving the expulsion of members of other families by the Fujiwara family or wrangling among the branches of the extensive Fujiwara clan itself.

One of the most celebrated affairs involving the expulsion of a member of another family by the Fujiwara was the removal of Sugawara Michizane from his post as minister and his exile to Kyushu. Born into a family of scholars, Michizane was an outstanding scholar whose ability in writing Chinese verse and prose was said to rival that of the Chinese themselves. Recognizing his talent, the emperor Uda singled Michizane out for an attempt to break the authority of the Fujiwara family, to whom the emperor had no connection. Uda appointed Michizane and Fujiwara Tokihira to a succession of government posts. In 899 Uda’s successor, the emperor Daigo, simultaneously appointed Tokihira and Michizane as his two top ministers. In 901 Tokihira, jealous of Michizane’s influence, falsely reported to Daigo (who was sympathetic to the Fujiwara) that Michizane was plotting treason. Michizane was demoted to a ministerial post in Kyushu, effectively sending him and his family into exile.

The culture of the 9th century was a continuation of that of the 8th, insofar as its foundations were predominantly Chinese. The writing of Chinese prose and verse was popular among scholars, and great respect for Chinese customs was shown in the daily lives of the aristocracy. Buddhist monks continued to travel to China to bring back as-yet-unknown scriptures and iconographic pictures. Buddhist sculpture and paintings produced in Japan were done in the Tang style. At the end of the 9th century, however, Japan cut off formal relations with Tang China, both because of the expense involved in sending regular envoys and because of the political unrest accompanying the breakup of the Tang empire. In fact, the Japanese court no longer had a model worthy of emulation, nor did it need one. The practical result was the stimulation of a more purely Japanese cultural tradition. Japanese touches were gradually added to the basically Tang styles, and a new culture slowly came into being, but it was not until the 10th century and later that this tendency became a strong current.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.